“Do you remember those stories you used to hear when you were a kid? The ones about the evil witches who’d cast enchantments on innocent young maidens? They’d turn them into trees or toadstools or warty crones, and they’d be cursed to never know the touch of a man? This is like that, except without quite as much hocus pocus…” she smiled wickedly “…or the innocence.”
“Your boyfriend’s a witch?” I said, using my typical boy-in-presence-of-disarmingly-cute-girl wit.
“Yeah. Sure is, genius. Right down to the broomstick and the pointy nose.” She looked down her nose at me, giving me a deadpan stare. “He’s not a witch or wizard or even a particularly skilled parlour magician. He’s just got me trapped, sort of. I can’t really say what it is. It’s taken me years to figure out that it was even there.”
“So, instead of turning you into a toadstool he’s…what? Made it so you’re invisible to every man but me?”
“No. It’s not just you, but it’s worse than being invisible.” She paused, changing trains of thought. “We met in this laundry room, right?”
I thought back a bit. “Right.”
“Except we didn’t. I’d seen you at least a dozen times before we ever ran into each other in here. I’d even had a conversation with you once outside the lifts.”
I looked at those green eyes, at that straight, brown hair. “Nan uh. I think I’d remember that.”
“You can’t. You couldn’t possibly. That’s why this is all so messed up. If I was invisible, that’d be one thing, but the reality is that everyone sees me. They look right at me. They have conversations with me. They just never notice me. I only ever hang around in their very shortest of short term memories.”
I just blinked at her, wide-eyed. “But I remember you. How else could I come down and meet you here when I do?”
“Yeah, sure you do. But just here. Haven’t you ever wondered why we can only ever be together in the Laundry room?”
“Well, yeah, but…” I had a reason, I just couldn’t put my finger on it anymore. “I assumed it was because this was a place he never came,” I suggested, though I after realized that was the first thought I’d ever given the matter. “So then why here?”
“I think it’s a mistake…or I guess a miracle, from my perspective. I think it’s a loophole in whatever he’s got me trapped in. When people come over to visit our apartment, they see me and they talk to me like normal. It’s only outside the apartment that I go unnoticed.” She shivered slightly. I put my arm around her.
“He’s a pretty traditional guy, you know? I’m guessing you got that impression from the kind of stuff I’ve told you about him so far. He’s got these ideas about how a woman’s proper place is in the home. I think it’s tied into that. I think that, whatever he’s doing, it only lets me be me so long as I’m in our home.”
I nodded. It all made the kind of disparate sense that things in the Building usually made.
“Except an apartment isn’t a home. It’s got all the parts of a normal home, but they’re spread out. Like, I think I got noticed by a guy while I was taking out the recycling one time.”
She laughed. “I was staging some kind of passive aggressive rebellion, I guess. I decided that, even though it was the dead of winter, I was going to take out the trash in my underwear. It was when I’d was only starting to understand what was going on, and I guess it was kind of a test. If anyone was going to notice me, I was betting that being half-naked would do the trick. So, I left the apartment in my underwear with a box of recycling, and I waited for the lifts. When the door opened, there was a guy inside carrying a bag of cans. He glanced at me when I got on, seemed like he was about to say something, and then he went back to looking at the blinking numbers. I kept trying to talk to him in the lift on the way down, and he kept half turning towards me before getting distracted by something and turning back to the numbers that were counting down to ground.
“I got frustrated, assuming that was all the proof I needed, and when we reached ground, I followed him out to the dumpsters without saying a word. We passed some people in the lobby on their way in, but they gave me only the same passing glances. So I followed this guy out into the cold, and I cursed my stupid idea all the frigid way to the bloody dumpsters. We both went in through the wooden gate, he hefted his bag of cans in, and turned back towards me. I was about to slip past him to dump my box, but I froze. He was staring right at me, looking real confused. All he could come up with was ‘what are you doing?’, and I was so surprised that I couldn’t think of what I was meant to do when and if someone DID notice me that I dropped the box of cans and just took off, running back to the apartment building. I looked back once, and he was standing just outside the wooden paddock where they keep the dumpsters, looking confused as hell."
“That was a while back, and I’d pretty much given up hope by the time I met you in here that first time and you blushed at my giant load of underwear.”
“Oh crap. You noticed? And here I was thinking I’d been so slick.”
“Are you kidding? You made it so bloody obvious that you’d noticed me by that bumbling stream you tried to pass off as small talk!” She smiled from ear to ear.
I endeavored to change the subject.
“So where do we go from here?”
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